engleski

Measuring family resilience in at-risk and general population youth

Resilience is a process of negotiating, managing and adapting to significant sources of stress, trauma or risk. Assets and resources within the individual, family and environment facilitate this capacity for adaptation and ‘bouncing back’, achieving good outcome in the face of adversity (Windle, 2011). Research of family resilience is growing field while its conceptualization and operationalization still remains challenging. Literature is inconclusive since family resilience is defined as a process while in practical research family members are asked upon their individual perception of family protective factors. Objective of this paper is to determine the level of family resilience in high-risk adolescent sample and general population youth sample and, secondly, to compare the perception of family resilience in aforementioned two subsamples. Family resilience was measured with the Family resilience scale, adapted from FACES IV (Olson, Gorall, Tiesel, 2004) and Sixbey (2005) constructed to measure three separate family resilience dimensions according to Walsh: family communication and problem solving, family belief system and family organization. First part of the study was conducted in a subsample of 120 high-risk adolescents that were included in the treatment interventions of social welfare system, usually because of their behavioral disorders, problems with violence, substance abuse or violation of the law. Second part of the study included 220 high-school students that were attending regular high- school (gymnasium and vocational schools). Exploratory factor analysis was conducted and results have shown satisfactory factor structure and three separate dimensions of family resilience scale in both subsamples. General population youth perceives family resilience quite high, with special accent on family organization while youth in risk reports upon high family belief system and lower family organization than general population. Results are indicating that family component can serve as important ingredient of prevention and treatment interventions for youth on different levels of risk .

resilience, youth, risk level, FamResPlan

Founded by Croatian Science Foundation (CSF IP- 2014-09-9515)